Opinion | Welcome home to (violent) America

I’m talking about the story from Cleveland, Tex., where a man allegedly shot and killed five people after being asked to stop firing his rifle in his yard. And the story from Atlanta, where a male suspect is accused of shooting five people, one fatally, at a hospital. And then, of course, the viral story of a White subway passenger in New York who put Jordan Neely, a Black homeless man, in a fatal chokehold.

As it happens, this weekend, I’ll be at a conference that aims to examine America’s gun violence problem. Later today, I’ll be moderating a panel of experts and historians on domestic violence, firearms and the law at Wesleyan University’s new Center for the Study of Guns and Society. (If you’d like to listen in, the panel will be featured on a future episode of the podcast “Our Body Politic.”)

And in the wee hours of Thursday morning, I faced a situation that brought all these issues home.

You can click through to see my Twitter thread. But I’m also recounting the story below. Trigger warning: The episode mentions domestic violence and aggression.

Home Front: Staging an intervention

It was 2 a.m., and I’d just parked my car at my apartment complex after returning from the gym near downtown Dallas. I sat for a bit with the engine off, doomscrolling on social media. Then I heard a woman’s voice.

It came from the space behind me. The woman was in her sedan, perpendicular to my car, yelling out her window at a man who was leaning out the window of his large truck. Both their engines were on, and I realized they must have just pulled in. It was clear the situation was escalating.

The woman was yelling at the man that he was stalking her and needed to leave. He kept insisting he wanted to talk.

At that moment, I had a choice: Ignore what was happening right in front of me, or intervene?

“Hey, is everything all right?” I said. I got out of my car. The yelling woman’s car was right behind mine, so I was boxed in. Another woman — the yelling woman’s friend — was in a separate car, a few yards away. When I walked over to talk with her, she gave me the background: The man and woman had dated briefly, but she’d tried to break up with him, and he’d gotten upset. That night, he’d followed her from her job.

I watched the first woman as she tried to drive toward the garage exit. To my horror, the man put his truck in reverse and blocked her car from exiting.

She started screaming and crying. I became increasingly scared for both women.

“I’m just trying to talk to my girlfriend!” the man screamed. Then he got out of his truck and walked up to his ex’s car. “This is none of your business,” he yelled at me. “You don’t know her!”

As is well documented, the most dangerous time for women in abusive relationships is when they try to leave a man. I asked the woman’s friend if she knew if the man owned a gun. (It’s Texas!) “I don’t know,” she said. I asked if she knew if the man was abusive. “Yeah, he once beat her so bad she went to the hospital.”

Two men drove into the garage. I told both of them that there was a bad situation going on. One stuck around. The other kept driving and presumably went to his apartment.

Then the situation escalated again. The first woman got out of her car and started pushing the man, who was probably about 6 inches taller and outweighed her by maybe 50 pounds. If he fought back, things would have gone very badly. The woman’s friend and I yelled at her to stop.

Finally, the man walked away. The women made it into the building. My male neighbor and I also started going in — but then, I realized I hadn’t heard the man’s truck engine turn on. I hadn’t heard him drive away. Sure enough, he was parked on the other side of the garage.

I got to my apartment safely but shaken. At least everyone was uninjured, for the time being. But I knew things could have turned out much, much worse.

Home Front Part 2: The bystander effect

What unites all these stories is the willingness of men to engage in disproportionate and unjustified violence in reaction to women and other vulnerable people. Then there is the sometimes excruciating slowness of the police — the passage of time in which tragedies might be prevented.

The night of the Texas massacre, the victimized family had called the police five times to complain about their neighbor’s gunfire; the police came too late. In the case of the aggressive man in my apartment complex, no police officer arrived to help us.

I know I took a huge risk in sticking around and engaging. But I think about all the New York subway passengers who did nothing to stop it as Jordan Neely was being choked to death on the train.

I think about the bystander effect — the theory that people are less likely to intervene if there is a big group watching. And I think about whom we deem worthy of protection. A small woman who just broke up with an ex seems a no-brainer. But a homeless Black man on the subway making noise? I guess not.

And ultimately, I think about how men, and White men especially, are time and again given passes to use violent force to deal with life’s ups and downs. Neely’s death was ruled a homicide. Yet as of this writing, no one has been arrested.

I don’t have all the answers. But after getting a taste of what a gun-free society feels like, I definitely wish I could have stayed longer in Japan.

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